Home > Stanford Ovshinsky, Inventor of the nickel-metal hydride battery and much more

Stanford Ovshinsky, Inventor of the nickel-metal hydride battery and much more

Stanford Ovshinsky, Inventor of the nickel-metal hydride battery and much
more

Stanford Ovshinsky, whose inventions led to flat-screen TVs and the Toyota Prius,
dies at 89(October 19) - Stanford Ovshinsky, whose battery inventions power most
of the world’s smartphones and other mobile devices, and helped the Toyota Prius
become the world's first successful hybrid car and allow the EV1 electric car
get 150 miles per charge, has died at age 89.

Stanford Robert Ovshinsky (November 24, 1922 –
October 17, 2012) was a prolific American inventor and scientist who had been
granted well over 400 patents over fifty years, mostly in the areas of energy
and information. Many of his inventions have had wide ranging applications.
Among the most prominent are: an environmentally friendly nickel-metal hydride
battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell
phones, and electric and hybrid cars; continuous web multi-junction flexible
thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat screen liquid crystal
displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile
phase-change memory. Ovshinsky opened the scientific field of amorphous and
disordered materials in the course of his research in the 1940s and 50s in
neurophysiology, neural disease, the nature of intelligence in mammals and
machines, and cybernetics. Amorphous silicon semiconductors have become the
basis of many technologies and industries. Ovshinsky is also distinguished in
being self-taught, without formal college or graduate training. Throughout his
life, his love for science and his social convictions were the primary engines
for his inventive work.

Stanford Ovshinsky and the EV1,
GM's First Electric Car

In 1960,
Ovshinsky and his soon-to-be second wife, Iris Dibner, founded
Energy Conversion Laboratory in a storefront in Detroit, dedicating
the laboratory to the solution of important societal problems using
science and technology.[5] Focusing on the critical areas of energy
and information, their new company, reconstituted in 1964 as Energy
Conversion Devices (ECD), went on to become a forefront invention
and development laboratory whose products have built new industries,
many of them aimed at making fossil fuel obsolete. ECD continues
(through joint ventures and license partners) to be a leading solar
energy and battery production firm.

Stanford Ovshinsky and a New Type of Solar Panel

Roughly a
year after Iris Ovshinsky's death in August 2006, Ovshinsky left ECD
and established a new company, Ovshinsky Innovation LLC, devoted to
developing the scientific basis for highly innovative and
revolutionary energy and information technologies. In October 2007
he married Rosa Young, a physicist who had worked at ECD on numerous
energy technologies including a hydrogen-powered hybrid car and on
Ovshinsky’s vision of a hydrogen-based economy. Ovshinsky died of
prostate cancer on October 17, 2012, aged 89.